


Pour reconstruire, plutôt que détruire

by actualbat



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, NOT A PIRATE AU, Sail Cargo AU, Tall Ships AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-27
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-22 11:25:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13165923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/actualbat/pseuds/actualbat
Summary: The transatlantic voyages of the cargo schoonerBarricadeand her intrepid crew.





	Pour reconstruire, plutôt que détruire

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from The Duhks’s song ["Toujours Vouloir"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-J49HqT7cg&index=5&list=PLRT5aNrPpkRAAi45m3HaSY_kwdWeWoYlu).

 

When the first glow of daylight filtered into the _Barricade_ ’s aft cabin, Enjolras rolled out of his bunk and stumbled blearily up to deck. He nodded to Bahorel, who stood at the helm, resting his well-muscled arms on the ship’s wheel. Third Mate Bahorel was powerfully built, Californian, of Samoan ancestry, and boisterous on land but reliable at sea. “Mark your head,” Enjolras ordered.

“Mark 220,” Bahorel responded, indicating the course he was steering by its compass position. Enjolras nodded, distractedly, noting the wind direction and their point of sail.

Dawn watch—0400-0800—had always been his favorite. It was not for the aesthetic attractions of a sunrise at sea, for aesthetics meant little to Enjolras, but rather for the acute symbolism of a new dawn, a new day, the sun rising on a new era of renewable energy and sustainable transoceanic shipping. This ship, this mission, and this route were the fulfillment of a dream he had nurtured for many years: to operate a transatlantic cargo shipping route under sail. He was an idealist, an environmentalist, and an activist, and he was putting his deeply-held beliefs into action. While far more environmentally friendly than a conventional cargo ship motoring across the seas, carrying cargo on a sailing vessel was significantly slower, more vulnerable to variations of winds and weather, and obviously more dangerous. It had yet to be seen whether or not this operation (which he and his shipmates had termed _le projet de l’ABC_ ) to transport goods “from A to B to C emission free” would be profitable and thus sustainable.

Their luck had held so far: they purchased the square topsail schooner _Barricade_ for cheap—too cheap—in Mallorca after her previous owner had gone bankrupt, fixed her up in a shipyard in Rochefort, France, and sailed their first load of cargo successfully from La Rochelle to Halifax and Portland. With large, gaff-rigged, fore-and-aft sails on the mainmast and foremast (the mainsail and the foresail), three fore-and-aft sails forward (known as the outer jib, inner jib, and the staysail), and square sails on the foremast (the fore topsail and, above it, the fore topgallant sail), the _Barricade_ was well-suited to coastal sailing as well as catching the transoceanic trade winds. This was the first dawn watch of a trip out from Portland, Maine, and they were sailing down the New England coast before catching the prevailing ocean current and heading east out into the Atlantic. 

He heard a primal rumble from below his feet: that would be the ship’s engineer starting up the generator at 0600 so that Éponine could make another pot of coffee. The whole crew drank coffee like water, and they insisted on brew from an electric percolator rather than the foul camp coffee that Éponine could make on the _Barricade_ ’s wood-burning stove. 

If he was being honest with himself, Enjolras resented the fact that a supposedly fossil fuel emission-free vessel needed to have an engineer on board. They had made the passage from La Rochelle to Halifax without one, and all the officers had split engineering duties, but a faulty watermaker and plumbing problems that arose halfway across the Atlantic (and the consequent lack of sleep for all the mates, particularly his Chief Mate Combeferre) had forced him to see that he would need to hire a designated engineer. The problem, however, was that few qualified tall ship engineers were willing to cast their lot in with such a risky venture. Enjolras had struck out with all his contacts. He didn’t blame them, but at that point he was at loose ends.

As they headed back out to sea from an emergency stop in Halifax, Éponine had emerged from the galley and approached him on the quarterdeck, her hair and face calico with soot from the wood stove and flour from her baking. “Do you know who’s in Maine right now and might be looking for engineering work?” she asked. 

Enjolras had sighed. Finding the right shore power connection in Halifax had been a mighty struggle due to the _Barricade_ ’s massively complicated electrical systems, much to the frustration of the whole crew. “Would we really want to bring him on? Is it worth the risk?”

Éponine had cocked one dark eyebrow and chided him, “It’s worth a shot if you want decent coffee in the mornings.” 

A ship’s cook was almost always the crewmember worst affected by any engineering problems, even on the traditional sailing vessels known as “tall ships," since the galley’s daily operations required functional electricity and plumbing more than anywhere else on the vessel. A ship without an engineer made a frustrated cook. A frustrated cook made an irritated crew. Enjolras, although not without difficulty, had understood that the welfare of his cook and his crew were of far greater importance to the success of their operation than his own self-righteous pride. “Where is he now?”

Éponine had smiled, a touch sardonically. “He’s working at the shipyard in Boothbay. He’ll only sign on with us if you ask him yourself.”

Boothbay was only a little out of Enjolras’s way once they got into port, he had decided. If it was necessary for him to grovel, to relax his employment standards, to keep a close eye on a problematic crewmember—well, he owed it to his crew, to the hard-working friends who had bought into his far-fetched plan to embark upon a trial voyage of cargo-carrying under sail across the Atlantic. He believed so strongly in the importance of renewable energy in the shipping industry, of going back to the old ways of harnessing wind power, and in the viability of this incipient venture that he had resolved to humble himself if necessary.

 

Enjolras made his morning rounds of the vessel. Below the foremast, he paused, looking up. Courfeyrac the bosun lounged on the fore shrouds and ratlines—sturdy rope ladders that ran between the deck and the top of each mast—on the windward side, where he called up encouragement to Marius Pontmercy. With evident trepidation, Marius eased himself up the steeply-angled futtock shrouds and onto the platform atop the foremast. Gavroche was already above him and out on the port fore topsail yard, egging him on with a tirade of obscenities that sounded anachronistic from the mouth of a pre-teen, “Come on, you dumb shit, haul your ass up and get out here—your chicken arms can’t be that fucking weak.” 

Cosette climbed up out of the fo’c’s’le hatch and came to stand by Enjolras. “Aloft training,” she murmured, smiling.

Marius Pontmercy was an old law school friend of Bossuet Laigle, brought aboard their operation to lend a whiff of respectability to the accounting side of things. In his head, Enjolras referred to Marius as their “supercargo,” like the landsmen who worked as clerks aboard merchant ships in the olden days. Marius knew precious little about sailing, especially traditional sailing, but was well versed in the laws and procedures that pertained to international shipping and customs, which Enjolras had come to learn was another set of expertise necessary for the success of their operation. While attempting to sort out the vexingly complicated regulations and procedures that restricted ocean-going cargo operations, he had begun to wish he had studied International Business and Logistics at his alma mater Maine Maritime Academy. On their last port visit, he had recruited Marius to take on that burden, hoping that his complete lack of practical boating experience would not be a problem. 

Marius stepped out onto the footrope of the topsail yard, clipped into the backrope with the short lanyard and carabiner attached to his climbing harness, and clung desperately to the yard as he inched himself outboard, away from the mast. All of a sudden, his eyes widened. It was clear to the onlookers that he was getting his first look at the extraordinary view from aloft: at this point in their passage, it was the vast expanse of the Atlantic stretching out away from them to port and the New England coastline rapidly disappearing on their starboard side.

Next to him, Cosette looked up at Marius with blue eyes wide in exquisite sympathy. Enjolras knew that she too was experiencing vicariously the thrill of going aloft, up into the rigging of a tall ship, for the first time. When the _Barricade_ had belonged to an educational non-profit organization and sailed around the world teaching traditional sailing and environmental science to teenagers, Cosette was a student onboard and then worked her way up to deckhand and educator before working on other vessels. She had been on the _Barricade_ ’s last crew as a teaching vessel before the bankruptcy, and the switch from sail training to sail cargo aboard the schooner had grieved her in particular. On their first trip out with cargo, she had snuck into the cargo hold, which used to house students’ bunks, and wept quietly. Nonetheless, she believed in Enjolras’s vision of a cleaner world through sail cargo, and she was a highly competent sailor and a sunny, gentle presence onboard. 

While Cosette watched her shipmates aloft, Enjolras felt the breeze and decided that it was light enough to pile on another sail. He walked back aft to the quarterdeck, where Grantaire was now at the helm, and went to confer with Bahorel as the officer of the deck. “Call it?” Enjolras asked.

Bahorel grinned in response. “Aloft on the fore,” he yelled.   

Courfeyrac replied from the topsail yard, “Aloft aye!”

“Loose out the fore topsail and lay to deck,” called Bahorel. Gavroche cheered loudly from his perch on the yard-arm. 

Courfeyrac, Gavroche, and Marius undid the ties that held the lowest square sail tight up to its yard, and untied the bunt gasket that held the center—the “bunt”—of it up; Marius’ squeaky voice was heard to call out “Fore topsail away!” as the magnificent expanse of canvas fell dramatically down in front of them. 

Once the crewmembers aloft had scrambled down the shrouds and back to deck, Bahorel shouted out orders for the setting of the sail. “Cast off your gear and sheet home!—That’s well sheets; hands to the halyard! Hands to braces! Haul your halyard!” The crew on deck ran about following his orders and hauling or easing each line in turn, laughing joyfully as they went. Enjolras joined in—laid in, in sailors’ parlance—with the hauling. He had no patience for the long-held tradition of captains disdaining physical work. The chain of command existed for a purpose, but he believed in equality among shipmates. With such a small crew, crossing the Atlantic, every pair of hands was needed to haul, climb, and pitch in whenever and wherever was necessary. Besides, he was young and strong and would have gone mad without the physical outlet of deckhands’ work.

When the braces were hauled tight to angle the sail appropriately to could catch the wind, and their speed had increased by a knot—a nautical mile—or so, Enjolras smelled bacon cooking on the wood stove below. The _Barricade_ ’s crew ate Éponine’s cooking in watches—shifts—according to who was about to go on watch and who was coming off watch (or was off already). Enjolras, as Captain and thus not standing watch, ate breakfast with the oncoming watch. He was glad of that right then, as the smell of bacon made him terribly hungry.

 

———

 

Later, the off-going watch and off-watch ate a cheerful breakfast together around the cozy, cramped fo’c’s’le table: crispy bacon, fluffy eggs, and fresh in-season strawberries. Éponine would still have fresh fruit and vegetables to feed them for several more days before their supplies ran out and she switched to frozen and canned. In the cramped—economical—crew quarters of a tall ship, everyone ate together in their watches, bumping elbows at the table, and slept in their watches, learning each other’s breathing patterns and sleeping habits without trying to. Grantaire was deeply familiar with these rhythms of life from his years of working on tall ships, but they felt strange and almost dreamlike after more than a year away from voyaging. It felt particularly unreal to be working with such an easy-going, welcoming group, composed of old friends who were glad to have him back and a few new shipmates who took enthusiastically to him because they knew no better. There was a sense of solidarity among the participants in this venture that was unusual even among tall ships: Grantaire supposed that it came from the shared excitement of doing something fresh and new and worthwhile, daring the world to prove them wrong. Enjolras’s idealism was contagious and addictive.

Enjolras had found him in Boothbay, lying on his back working underneath the engine of one of the Sea Semester boats in drydock, covered in grease. Grantaire thought for a moment that he was hallucinating from the ever-present shipyard fumes: not in his wildest dreams would he have expected Enjolras to come looking for him, and certainly never imagined him looking as hesitant and shy as a pre-Raphaelite heroine. Enjolras’s hair was curlier than usual from the New England summer humidity, escaping from its tie to spread like a halo around his face, adding to the Burne-Jones effect.

Grantaire had been too startled to be anything but brusque. “Why are you here?”

Enjolras had winced slightly, throwing off the gorgeous classical symmetry of his face, but then recovered his composure and stood erect and proud. He launched into a speech about his sail cargo venture, his dreams for it, the ship they were sailing, the trade deals they had worked up in New England and France, and the prospects of the operation, but Grantaire cut him short, snapping, “I’ve heard about your fucking reenactment. What do you want from me?”

“We need an engineer.” The crease in Enjolras’s forehead had deepened, and he had seemed almost wretched—a far cry from his usual fiery demeanor. “We need you.” He looked down at his feet, then muttered, “I need you,” and met Grantaire’s gaze again. Grantaire had felt the full force of those dazzling blue eyes on him.

Grantaire was a weak man. “When do you leave port?”

 

While he helped with breakfast cleanup in the small, cheerful, woodsmoke-scented galley, Grantaire let his mind wander. He would frankly admit to anyone who asked that he had been curious about what Enjolras would do as the captain of his own ship, in charge of his own destiny. He had been curious about Enjolras’s leadership style, especially after being inundated for years with all of his utopian rhetoric about equality in the Merchant Marines and ships as floating communes. When accepting Enjolras’s offer of the engineering position, nonetheless, he had assumed that this Greek god of the tall ships world would be as aloof as every other captain and that Grantaire could admire him safely from afar. He had not bargained on the fact that the _Barricade_ ’s engine room access was through the aft cabin where the officers slept, nor on Captain Enjolras’s unusual and enthusiastic participation in the hard physical work of sailing. 

Éponine gave him the side-eye when he sighed lustily at a cast-iron pan that he was attempting to scour. An old shipmate of his, she was a good friend on land or at sea. She was frighteningly competent at the demanding seacook work of feeding a hungry sailing crew with three healthy meals a day on a strict schedule, often cooking in rolling seas, and she made it her business to know everything about everyone who had ever sailed tall ships. In that industry, where competent sailors and steady jobs were both perpetually hard to find, gossip—about who was where, which ships needed people, who was a good shipmate, and who was a liability—was highly valued.

“Éponine, help me,” he complained, and made a face. “He sweats a line like a girl, and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

Éponine was well familiar with the attractiveness of a graceful, powerful “sweat”—a way of hauling on a line that used the momentum of one’s bodyweight to its natural advantage. She took the cast-iron pan from Grantaire’s hands and began to scrub it with kosher salt.

“Éponine, I’m so fucked.”

“You are so fucked. Go to bed, I’ll handle the rest of this.”

Exhausted, Grantaire crawled into his bunk and fell almost immediately sleep.

 

———

 

Enjolras bent over the chart table with Feuilly, conferring over routes and tracing them on the paper nautical chart spread out in front of them. Feuilly was the _Barricade_ ’s Second Mate, traditionally the ship’s navigation officer as well as the leader of a watch. He was a “hawsepiper”, meaning that he had worked his way up through the ranks instead of attending a maritime academy like Enjolras and Combeferre. An orphan, he had adopted the entire tall ships community as his family. He was originally from Milwaukee, and after a high school field trip on a historical schooner on Lake Michigan, he saw the maritime industry as his ticket out from foster care and got his start sailing on the Great Lakes. Steady, cheerful, and down to earth, he was an excellent officer and an honorable shipmate.

After tacking back and forth for two days, heading south from Portland, the _Barricade_ and her crew had caught a favorable current at about 42ºN and headed east out into the Atlantic. They were making good time, and the weather was mostly fair.

Enjolras climbed up out of the aft cabin and smiled at the helmsman, Jean Prouvaire, nicknamed Jehan. “Mark your head.”

“Mark 060.”

“Good.” A commotion at the starboard main pinrail caught his attention, and he turned around, noting that Courfeyrac was teaching Marius how to properly sweat a line. Although the whole crew (minus Gavroche) came from sail training backgrounds and were experienced at teaching green deckhands how to sail, Enjolras was pleased to see that Courfeyrac had taken Marius under his wing. As bosun (or boatswain), Courfeyrac was responsible for the _Barricade’s_ rigging—masts, yards and other spars, shrouds and stays and ratlines, the miles of line that made up their running rigging, and of course the sails. He was a highly skilled, knowledgeable, and experienced sailor who lacked the drive to navigate the Coast Guard’s impenetrable regulations and get a mate’s license for himself—and he was endlessly friendly and gregarious.

Courfeyrac grinned, chiding Marius, “You aren’t doing it right! You have to use your lower body more, it’s the strongest part of you. You gotta, you gotta drop the butt hammer.” Marius’ face contorted in embarrassment. “Cosette, you demonstrate, you’re the best at it.”

She jumped up to the line and grabbed on to it, then swung gracefully out towards the sea, fell back towards the mast, and slid in towards the belaying pin in one fluid motion. Marius’ jaw fell open, and his face turned bright red. Enjolras applauded. Cosette smiled sunnily at Marius, saying, “Here, try it again!”

 

———

 

Most of the _Barricade_ ’s crew slept in the twelve bunks in the fo’c’s’le: top and bottom, six on port and six on starboard. Éponine the cook slept furthest aft, nearest to the galley, and they all stored their excess gear in the empty bunks. Enjolras and the three mates (Combeferre, Feuilly, and Bahorel) slept in the aft cabin’s four bunks. There was no privacy onboard—there never really was, on a tall ship—and the belowdecks spaces were filled with a convivial commotion whenever meals were eaten around the communal fo’c’s’le table or when the watch changed over. Trimmed in gorgeous honey-colored wood, with brass lamps and baskets of fruit that hung, swaying, from the overhead beams, the fo’c’s’le felt like something out of an N.C. Wyeth painting or Rudyard Kipling’s _Captain’s Courageous_. The effect was only spoiled by the brightly hued, high-tech foul-weather gear that littered the space.

On the _Barricade_ , wake-ups for watch and mealtimes were never the same twice. Jehan—bosun’s mate, sensitive rich boy, perpetually a tall ships volunteer, keeper of the herb garden that flourished on top of the Captain's cabin, poet with words as well as with a sail needle—gave the best and gentlest wake-ups, although Cosette's were a close second. The usual sequence of a wake-up went something like this: “Grantaire, hey, Grantaire. This is your wake-up. The time is 0340 and you have watch in twenty minutes. It’s cold and rainy outside—you’re going to need your foul-weather gear and lots of layers. Are you awake?” 

Jehan, however, assessed the sleeper’s degree of awareness by asking a different, absurd question every time: “Grantaire, if you were a vegetable, what would you be?” His weather reports were colorful if not particularly helpful: “Soft the rain falls from opal-hued skies, and swift sweeps under heaven the raven cloud’s flight.“ Courfeyrac gave the most obnoxiously loud and chipper wake-ups, and Gavroche had been known to pinch.

Watch-standing, as per usual on long voyages, was repetitive and monotonous, forever a rotation between standing at the wheel, standing lookout, checking the height of the water in the bilges and pumping it out when it got too high, doing engine room checks to ensure that the generator and batteries were running properly, plotting their position on the nautical charts, and of course handling sail when necessary at the direction of Grantaire's easy-going watch officer Bahorel. On his watch, called Charlie Watch in accordance with tradition and the phonetic alphabet, Cosette and Gavroche worked on bosunry projects—tarring, greasing, patching, and on and on—to keep the rig in good repair, while Grantaire ran the watermaker and did engineering maintenance and problem-solving. The monotony, broken occasionally by whale sightings, was comforting. Grantaire particularly enjoyed the 0000-0400 watch, because while stationed at look-out or helm, he could peer up at the stars and think about the stories from Greek mythology associated with each constellation. Sometimes he told Bahorel and Cosette about Sagittarius as Chiron the centaur who taught Achilles how to shoot a bow, or Zeus as the swan seducing Leda the Queen of Sparta. Gavroche was not at all interested in Greek mythology. Rather, he pestered Grantaire endlessly with questions about marine engineering, especially the _Barricade_ ’s systems.

During his off-watch time, when not sleeping or bitching with Éponine in the galley, Grantaire sketched and painted. He drew and watercolored a diagram of the _Barricade_ ’s pinrail for Marius, to help him learn where each line was and what it did. He drew caricatures of his shipmates, and painted watercolors of the ever-changing sky and sea and shadowed canvas, thinking of how Turner depicted light over water.

One evening, while sitting on the anchor chain locker and drawing a labelled diagram of the anchor windlass for Marius, Grantaire looked up from his sketchbook to see Enjolras standing in front of him on the foredeck, staring pensively out to sea. The captain was an incredibly striking-looking individual, with his long, curly blond hair pulled back, his blue eyes, brown skin, and finely chiseled features—he was as angular as an Egon Schiele portrait but painted in the colors of Kehinde Wiley. He came from biracial Cape Verdean ancestry, which (as far as Grantaire knew) explained his unusual coloring. 

Despite his slim frame and average height, Enjolras inevitably stood out in a crowd. Girls at maritime academies became ardent feminists almost automatically through the consciousness of their minority female status, and in the same way, Enjolras had become increasingly political and outspoken simply because he stood out as a person of color at Maine Maritime Academy in the isolated New England community of Castine. (Of course, Grantaire had heard none of this directly from the man himself. He knew most of what he did about their fearless leader from Combeferre, who had met Enjolras at MMA and bonded with him over the shared experience of being ambitious black men at a predominantly white institution.)

Grantaire secretly relished the poetic justice of it all: Enjolras’s ancestors had been carried as slaves—human cargo—aboard sailing vessels like this one, and now he was the captain. With his story, and his looks, he would make the perfect statue for a ship’s figurehead. Grantaire flipped to a new page in his sketchbook.

That night, he showed the sketch of Enjolras as a figurehead to the members of Alpha Watch over dinner, and they all laughed heartily. Combeferre was their watch officer, a Boston native who had studied Vessel Operations Technology with Enjolras at MMA but took extra science classes and sat in on lectures for courses that he couldn’t register for. He took wilderness medicine classes whenever he was on shore and was punctilious about keeping his medical certifications current. Grantaire had sailed with Combeferre as Medical Officer, years ago, and had thought that his phenomenal bedside manner was even more suited to the job than his copious medical knowledge. Combeferre was patient, calm, and encouraging as Chief Mate; although relatively young for the position, he filled it admirably. Much of the tenor of a ship’s crew depended on the temperament and leadership style of their Chief Mate, and any crew serving under Combeferre was a happy one. Tall and lean, with dark black skin, eyeglasses worn on a lanyard, large expressive hands, and bright white teeth that gleamed when he grinned, he translated his captain’s ideas and commands into something that the crew could follow easily. Enjolras, in keeping with his communist leanings, dispensed with the titles of shipboard rank and insisted that “shipmate” be the only title used—but Combeferre just called everyone “man.”

Joly, also in Alpha Watch, was the current Medical Officer. He was Hong Kong Chinese, had fallen in love with tall ships as a child through the novels of Patrick O’Brian, and told people that he was only taking a break from medical school to sail. Fretful about others’ welfare and a hypochondriac himself, he was nonetheless the most ebullient member of the crew. He cried out the loudest when a pod of dolphins appeared, and wore the brightest colors and patterns. He was inseparable from Bossuet, the other member of Alpha Watch, a cheerful but perpetually unlucky French-Canadian whose attempts to obtain merchant mariner credentials kept being stymied by paperwork errors or missed deadlines or simply by his being in the wrong country at the wrong time. Bossuet was prematurely bald, and his surname was L’Aigle; years ago, Grantaire had designed his tattoo of a bald eagle. Joly and Bossuet shared a bunk and shared a girlfriend in Portland. It was rather an odd arrangement, even by the freewheeling tall ships industry standards, but it worked well for them and did not interfere in the least with their ability to work together. 

Grantaire had absolutely no right to judge, he knew, since his unrequited ardor for Enjolras was a constant thorn in the side of their working relationship. Their dysfunctional dynamic had begun as a result of Grantaire figuring out that the fastest way to get his gorgeous, utopian superior officer’s attention was to needle him at muster about his beliefs. Grantaire had eventually seen himself become the stereotype of the cynical ship’s engineer, and he took jobs specifically to work with Enjolras—then hated himself bitterly for it. His persistent crush had become something of an open secret in the tall ship community, and he surmised that everyone on board the _Barricade_ knew and pitied him for it. They laughed with him at his caricatures of Enjolras, but then eyed him with concern across the fo’c’s’le table.

 

———

 

Another of the _Barricade_ crew’s off-watch pastimes was music-making. They congregated on the foredeck every now and then with their instruments, and played and sang whatever came to mind: Johnny Cash, Malajube, sea shanties, French folk songs, Joan Baez. Joly and Bossuet traded off on ukulele and harmonica, Feuilly played the banjo, Courfeyrac had a bongo drum and a tambourine, Bahorel was learning to play the concertina, Jehan played circles around all of them on a pennywhistle, and Grantaire strummed along on a battered guitar that he had found hidden somewhere on board. Cosette sang frequently in her bewitchingly breathy voice. Gavroche knew all the rude shanties, and sang them lustily. Marius listened, enraptured, to all of it. Éponine was rarely to be found at these impromptu jam sessions, claiming that they were “too goddamn kum-ba-ya” for her. Enjolras also rarely joined in, although for a variety of reasons. Primarily, he was not particularly musical, and he believed in giving his crew their traditional recreation time away from the captain.

He wandered up during one of their after-dinner musicales, following the sound of Cosette singing a macabre sort of lullaby in French, and paused a few feet away from all of them to listen. 

“ _Entendez-vous dans la plaine_  
_Ce bruit venant jusqu’à nous?_  
_On dirait un bruit de chaîne_  
_Se traînant sur les cailloux._ ”

Cosette trailed off evocatively at the end of the song, and she poked Grantaire’s shoulder with her finger, saying, “Now it’s your turn!” Having spotted Enjolras lurking nearby before any of the others, she smiled mischievously. “Sing ‘Cappy John’s Bride’, Grantaire. I know you know it!”

Grantaire winced, and ducked his head, protesting, “No, no, no one wants a sea shanty.” 

“I do!” Joly shoved him playfully.

Grantaire sighed, and sang.

“Now a skipper that we all know, who was famous long ago   
He was looking for a ship as his had gone aground.  
Though it was sometimes stated ’twas the way he navigated   
Ol' Cappy John was rated as the finest man around.  
  
There was a ship nearby that he wanted for to try   
It belonged to Ned McKenzie and was called the Mary Beale,  
But old John was shy of girls and the place was full of curls   
And he didn't have the nerve to go and make his deal.”

Halfway through the second verse, he noticed Enjolras loitering, and grinned salaciously at him while he sang the chorus: 

“She carries her bow high and her stern is nice and round   
It's easy to hold her when she's sheeted down   
She is my heart's desire and all that I require   
Is that you let me try her when I come to town!” 

Enjolras couldn’t remember ever having heard Grantaire sing. He was pleasantly surprised at the engineer’s tunefulness and clear voice, which briefly (but only briefly) overpowered his offense at the mockery and misogyny of the words. He made a mental note to listen in more often during these foredeck jam sessions, hoping to hear the engineer sing something less awful.

———

Of course, the pleasant monotony of the voyage could not last. The weather radar glowed threateningly with yellow and green, and although tropical storms were not unusual in this part of the North Atlantic during late summer, the officers agreed that there was only a fifty-fifty chance that this one would veer north and intercept their route. As ship’s boy, Gavroche was ordered to wear foulies—foul-weather gear—all day in the sunshine, in the old superstitious hope that it would make the storm pass them by.

Gavroche was Éponine’s kid brother, and even his sister described him as “a little shit.” He despised the safety harnesses worn for climbing (“They just get in your way!”) but skylarked aloft whenever anyone would let him. Just as his sister made a point of knowing everything about everyone, Grantaire seemed to pride himself on knowing everyone’s pressure point. He was hilariously, absurdly foul-mouthed, but extremely resourceful, endlessly curious, and a quick study. He complained vociferously about being made to wear the foulies until he realized how uncomfortable Enjolras was with the concession to superstition, and started using it to tease him.

Enjolras held court during lunch, railing about the tyranny of superstition, gesturing intensely with his soup spoon, exclaiming that “There is no room for maritime superstition in the present, or in the future. Just think—if we held fast to the belief that women were bad luck on ships, there would be no educational tall ships.” (Women made up a relatively large percentage of professionals in that particular niche of the maritime industry.) “When we remain mired in superstition, there is no impetus for innovation. As Hume put it, ‘Weakness, fear, melancholy, together with ignorance, are the true sources of superstition.’”

“Aha!” Grantaire pointed at Enjolras with his fork, and countered him, “But Hume was also arguing against the dangers of enthusiasm—of imagination, and hope—something that most people might say you’re a big fan of.”

“He was talking about evangelical Christianity, you numbskull.”

“Oh what do I know, I’m just a dumb engineer.” Grantaire cocked an eyebrow, and continued, “But people find comfort and hope in old maritime superstitions, and who are you to deny them that?”

Enjolras chewed his dumplings while marshaling arguments. He responded, “Who are you to say anything about belief? I thought you had proved to yourself that cynicism is always the answer.” 

“It’s a better answer to everything than idealism; think about how overworked and underpaid all the starry-eyed green hands are on tall ships, dreaming of emotional fulfillment by working themselves to death for a non-profit that only pays them peanuts, all in the name of idealism.” 

His argument apparently hit uncomfortably close to home, and Enjolras deflected, saying “That’s only because non-profit organizations operate in a capitalist system that rewards greed and debasement instead of belief in a greater good.”

Grantaire replied, “That’s a shitty excuse and you know it, a shitty excuse to exploit young people in the name of idealism. At least you pay us well, but you can’t excuse the sins of the entire industry.”

They sniped back and forth at each other until Éponine, exasperated, came and stood at the foot of the table with her hands on her hips. Abashed, they both rose and moved to the galley to wash their dishes.

 

In this state of enforced sobriety, and while trying to distract himself from the heavy weight of longing that had settled uncomfortably in his stomach, Grantaire noticed cues in his shipmates’ interactions with each other that he supposed he would rather not have seen. He saw the way Marius gazed adoringly at Cosette, and Cosette smiled sweetly back, looking up through her long eyelashes, and he saw the way that Éponine kept making Marius’ favorite foods. 

Jehan, sitting on the foredeck with Grantaire in the brilliant afternoon light, and watching as Cosette worked with Marius aloft on replacing a worn-out line, murmured a few lines of Keats in his ear. 

“With every morn their love grew tenderer,  
With every eve deeper and tenderer still;  
He might not in house, field, or garden stir,  
But her full shape would all his seeing fill—"

Grantaire laughed, but sobered up quickly. For a green hand, from whom all the wonder and the mystery of life at sea had not yet evaporated, a tall ship under sail was the ideal place to fall in love. Sunsets and sunrises reflected off the water covered everything in a rosy glow; fresh breezes and heady panoramas aloft heightened the senses; shared danger and shared joy bred attraction like a petri dish. Grantaire had seen this happen many times and knew it well, ever since the long-ago day when a fair-haired, slim, implacably stern but entrancingly starry-eyed young officer had taken his breath away. That officer, of course, had raised the disdainful resistance of a stone wall against Grantaire's awkward attempts to get his attention. It appeared that Cosette—although slightly bemused by them—was much more receptive to the overtures of her smitten green hand. Grantaire wished them happiness. 

His own youthful adoration had grown and festered over the years into a bitter thing, a whirlpool of attraction and self-loathing that sucked him down whenever Enjolras was near. It eventually reached the point that Grantaire, he was ashamed to admit, had simply not been able to handle it sober. At first, he had sought to escape from his obsession in the sort of situational relationships and sexual partnerships of convenience that were endemic to tall ships—a sailor slept and spent their free time with someone while they were on the same ship, and separated at the end of their contract—mostly with women. When that no longer sufficed to distract him, he had turned to the pleasant haze of drunkenness as a way to dull the pain, courting disaster in an industry where regulations about substance use were heavily enforced by the Coast Guard. 

He had realized that he was flirting with disaster once again when he went to turn the generator on at 0600 on their first day out from Portland. As he had tiptoed through the aft cabin, Enjolras’s bunk curtain was half open, and his face was visible, relaxed and peaceful in sleep, so very different from his usual stern expression. His hair was loose, strewn in a wild golden halo on the pillow around his head. Suddenly feeling voyeuristic and guilty for glimpsing this softer iteration of his captain, Grantaire had fled into the engine room to catch his breath and slow the beating of his heart. When he left the engine room a few minutes later to go back up on deck, Enjolras was no longer in his bunk, and Grantaire had been stupidly grateful.

Weeks later, as he sat watching Marius and Cosette and traded snippets of Romantic poetry with Jehan, the wind picked up slightly—but not enough to worry about.

 

Grantaire was roused from a deep sleep by the urgent shout of “All hands on deck!”

He jerked upright in the total darkness, heart racing, and rolled out of his bunk, instantly alert. The fo’c’s’le was full of the sounds of people pulling on foulie jackets, so he grabbed his own and threw it on, shoved his feet into his boots, grabbed his harness and rig knife, and dashed up the companionway. On deck, all was chaos—the wind howled in the rig, the rain pelted, and the moon was a bare sliver—but Combeferre shouted orders through the din. “Hands to strike sail! Clew up all standing! Strike the headsails! Ease peak and throat halyards!”

To Grantaire’s astonishment, he responded instantly and calmly, moving first to the starboard topsail gear and hauling with the strength born of desperation, then to the outer jib halyard and casting it off, then aft to the fore peak halyard to bring the large gaff foresail down and out of the wind. Other crewmembers—no telling who, in the darkness—worked in tandem with him and around him to bring all the sails in as quickly as possible before they blew out and shredded from the extraordinary force of the winds.

When the sails were all in, the immediate danger had passed, and the crew was occupied in putting quick furls in the sails that could be furled from deck. The _Barricade_ pitched up and down and side to side with the motion of the sea, but Enjolras was at the wheel and he held her course steady through the waves.

When Grantaire heard Combeferre call out, “Muster midships,” he rustled towards him along with ten other faceless, gore-tex-covered creatures. Once gathered, they heaved a collective sigh, and Combeferre said, “Well, kids, that was the outer edge of a tropical cyclone that just hit us. Nice quick response. We’ll check out the damage once it’s light out, although I don’t expect there to be too much. Bravo Watch, take back the deck, and we’ll see what this weather does. Everyone else, watch below.”

They all echoed him cheerfully, “Watch below!”

As Grantaire stripped off his foul-weather gear and crawled back into his bunk, he felt the adrenaline dissipate, leaving in its place the realization that it had been at least two years since he had responded to an all-hands call, or struck sail in an emergency. It was a gratifying feeling that all his training, his conditioning through drill after drill, and his years of experience still held, still resided somewhere in his muscle memory. He had missed tall ships like a hole in his heart after he was kicked out of the industry, missed the high that came with being part of a well-trained crew, like a cog in a well-oiled machine.

 

———

 

At daybreak, Courfeyrac clambered all over the _Barricade_ ’s rigging, checking assiduously for wear and damage. He reported to Enjolras that there was a large rent in the outer jib as well as a smaller one in the topsail, and assigned the patch jobs to Jehan. Once the winds had calmed down sufficiently, they re-set the staysail and foresail. Feuilly calculated how far the storm had pushed them off course and how far they needed to alter their present course to compensate. Enjolras was grateful to have such a competent crew. They set more sail as the wind allowed for it, and plowed on ahead toward France.

All was not entirely well, however. Enjolras stood on the foredeck, watching Jehan plunge a thick needle deftly in and out of canvas, when Bossuet approached with a rueful smile upon his face, and told him, “Well, I couldn’t get the big generator to start.”

Enjolras sighed, thoroughly glad that he had bitten the bullet and hired a ship’s engineer. “Have you informed Grantaire?”

“Of course, he’s tinkering with it now. You ought to go pay him a visit.” Bossuet winked; Enjolras realized in an uncomfortable way that he was missing some sort of implication.

He strode purposefully aft, aiming to descend into the engine room and, perhaps, understand. He passed through the Captain’s cabin, cranked open the engine room door, and realized immediately that he had hardly been in here since sailing from Portland. The space was surprisingly roomy for a tall ship engine room, owing to the _Barricade_ ’s deep draught, which meant that Enjolras could actually stand up in it. It contained one large diesel engine (a Detroit Diesel 671 with 240 horsepower, only ever used to get the schooner on or off a tricky dock), two generators (one large, one small), two battery banks (one bank for powering the Coast Guard-required navigational instruments), the general service pump manifold (for fighting fires and pumping out bilges), an overly complicated series of electrical panels, a wide assortment of tools, and a workbench for engineering projects. It also contained, at the moment, one Grantaire, half-naked and gleaming with sweat from the heat of the compartment.

Enjolras wasn’t sure when he had seen Grantaire shirtless before, or if he ever had. He certainly didn’t remember all these tattoos, or these incredible arm muscles. He was assailed by the realization that Grantaire could probably lift him up without even trying—it was a strangely attractive thought. Physical attraction meant little to Enjolras, he believed, serving only as a distraction from his work. To him, physical prowess was only relevant in as much as it affected his shipmates’ ability to do their job: did a potential crewmember have enough upper-arm strength to climb aloft? could they haul up a halyard? He rarely actually _looked_ at people, certainly not in the assessing way he looked at a hold full of cargo, or wave patterns in the sea, or cloud formations in the sky. Now, in the close space of the engine room, he found himself noticing Grantaire’s riot of dark curly hair, his stubble, his heavy and expressive eyebrows, his hazel eyes under long dark lashes, and the sweep of bright color across his chest and upper arms.

With difficulty, Enjolras wrenched himself back into professionalism. “What’s going on with the genny?”

Grantaire sighed. “Well, the fuel filter’s fucked. It’s just old, and needed replacing, and it let air into the fuel line. This is why you should’ve had an engineer working on this ship from the start, to make sure that things like filters get replaced regularly. I’ll get a replacement when we’re in port but we can’t run this generator until then, we’ll have to run the smaller one and be very careful about conserving battery power.”

Enjolras caught himself observing that Grantaire gestured naturally with his callused hands while he talked. “Understood. I’ll make sure that each watch knows, and Éponine.”

“Yeah, cool.” Grantaire paused, eyeing Enjolras suspiciously, and asked, “Why are you looking at me like that? Is there a problem?”

“I—” Enjolras shook himself. “I just haven’t been in this compartment for a while.”

Grantaire laughed sardonically. “Ah, yes, the great visionary environmentalist deigns to enter Hades’ lair, o the despiséd place of fossil fuels—”

“Which hold sailors hostage to the capitalist exploitation of oil barons, as well as doing irreparable damage to the environment—”

“You’re such a hypocrite, Enjolras. You can’t live without weather radar, or coffee from a percolator, or a charged smartphone, but you rail against modern technology and fuel-guzzling machinery. If you really want to go back to the old ways, you have to give things up.”

“Then would you prefer to have only manual bilge pumps? I believe in using technology, when it’s appropriate and sustainable, to combat the uncertainty of the future and make the world a better place.”

“The only certainty is a full tank of fuel.”

At that, Enjolras lost his patience. He glared venomously at Grantaire, turned on his heel, and stormed out of the engine room, catching his breath in the aft cabin before going back up on deck.

Cosette lounged on the aft cabin-top, sunbathing in the slanted afternoon light. When Enjolras emerged from the companionway, she peered up at him, a look of concern in her large eyes. “How fares Demeter?”

“Demeter?” He raised an eyebrow.

“The big generator?” Enjolras must still have looked puzzled, so Cosette explained, “Grantaire named all the appliances and things after characters from Greek mythology. The gennies are Demeter and Persephone, the engine is Hermes, the battery banks are Tiresias and Cassandra, the general service pump is Hephaestus, the watermaker is Galatea, oh, and Hera is the wood stove because she keeps demanding sacrifices. I can’t believe you haven’t heard of this.” (Enjolras hadn’t.) “It’s all pretty clever.” (It was.) “So what’s wrong with Demeter?”

 

That night, after Alpha Watch took the deck from Charlie at 2000, Enjolras pulled Bahorel aside, and asked him quietly about how Grantaire was doing in his watch. 

Much to his surprise, Bahorel threw back his head and laughed uproariously. “You're going off old assumptions, my dude. He's good, he's great, he's a much better shipmate than he used to be."

Enjolras objected, surprised: ”But he's such an ass all the time--"

Bahorel chortled at him again, and continued, "To you! You're the only person onboard who doesn't get along with him these days. I think the time away from you was good for him.”

Unsure how to respond to that, Enjolras thanked him, and left. His worldview had taken quite a beating in the last few hours. There were, he had known, good and cooperative crewmembers, and then there was Grantaire. There were people who could be counted on because they believed in the value of sail training or sail cargo, and then there was Grantaire the skeptic, who drank too much, fell asleep on watch, and ruined an expensive inverter by flooding it with graywater while drunk off his ass. Years of frustration had made him reluctant to trust someone so apparently incorrigible, but maybe this was an opportunity to learn and grow.

 

———

 

Enjolras poked his head into the engine room several more times over the next few days, asking questions about the health and welfare of all the various systems and equipment, and Grantaire assumed that it was payback for how he had needled the captain about his presence in the compartment. It took his breath away each time: even in the cramped belowdecks spaces, Enjolras carried himself with impeccable poise and moved with a fluid, preternatural grace that belied the intensity of his trademark righteous anger.

Grantaire took refuge in the galley, venting his feelings to Éponine as she peeled potatoes. “It’s not fair, he’s too beautiful, I can’t concentrate.”

She gave him an unimpressed glance. “Now you know how I feel whenever Marius comes in here.” Seeing Grantaire grimace and open his mouth to speak, she shook her head, assuring him, “I know, I know perfectly well that he’s crazy about Cosette, and I don’t have a chance. But he’s so pretty and nice that I can’t help it. You know what works for me, though? Taking out my frustration with a hatchet. If you’re going to stand here and complain, you might as well be useful and chop me some kindling.”

Grantaire attacked the knotty, unwieldy lengths of wood with a vengeance. Just as he was starting to feel a bit less stressed, Gavroche’s voice preceded him into the galley. “Ép! Ép! Guess what!”

“What, you little shit?” Éponine threw a bowlful of potato chunks into a bubbling pot on the stove.

“Bahorel’s teaching me to roll charges! I’m gunner’s mate now!”

Grantaire paused, mid-swing of the hatchet, and asked incredulously, “You guys actually use those cannons?”

Éponine nodded. “Not much, because black powder’s hard to get, but it’s a great way to advertise that we’re coming into a port. I’m guessing that rolling charges means we’re almost there.” She addressed the last sentence to Gavroche, who nodded excitedly.

Sure enough, Enjolras strode quietly into the galley a minute later, when Grantaire had returned to his wood-splitting. “Éponine,” he announced, “I just want to let you know that we expect to get into La Rochelle in about a day.” He noticed Grantaire in the corner, dripping with sweat and surrounded by kindling, and stopped in his tracks. “Oh, hi, Grantaire. I, um, I should tell you that we’ll need to have the engine ready to use in case the winds aren’t favorable to get us into the harbor.”

Grantaire had never heard Enjolras speak so awkwardly. Clearly, his inflexible captain deeply resented the thought of having to start their engine at all. “Gotcha, will do.”

 

When “ _le Phare des Baleines_ ”—the Lighthouse of the Whales—hove into view off the _Barricade_ ’s port bow, just after daybreak, the crew on deck all cheered, and Enjolras pumped his fist in triumph. Gavroche scampered aloft to skylark on the journey in, this being his first time arriving in La Rochelle. Eventually Bahorel called up to him: “Aloft on the fore! Get back down to deck if you want to be powder monkey!”

After the off-watch breakfasted, all hands were called up on deck to prepare for coming into port. Marius’ face was alight with nervous joy, and Grantaire could not stop a grin from stealing across his face. The last time he had been in La Rochelle was at least two years ago, and he was secretly very pleased that Enjolras had managed to set up trade partnerships in the city—although not surprised, since the nascent sail cargo community had a powerful ally in La Rochelle. 

The _Barricade_ carried four three-pound cannons onboard. She had been built originally as a replica of a barricade-running privateer from the War of 1812, so the weaponry was historically accurate. In the twenty-first century, however, her crew was no longer allowed to shoot three-pound cannonballs. Instead, they simply fired off charges of black powder that produced clouds of smoke and created sound waves with which they could “hit” targets. Bahorel and Gavroche fired two shots at the Casino Barrière, whose large glass windows made a spectacularly loud reverberation—passersby in the Parc d’Orbigny whooped and waved merrily at them—and two booming shots directly at downtown, before they tacked and headed into the largest marina.

Sailing directly upwind into the marina was clearly not going to be feasible, and Enjolras grudgingly asked Grantaire to fire up the engine. The rest of the crew, having laid out docklines and fenders on deck already, scurried around taking in sail in response to Combeferre’s commands. Enjolras, concentrating intently at the helm, his curls escaping every which way, steered the _Barricade_ precariously up to their dock. Cosette threw up her arms in delight when she spied the man standing by to catch and secure their docklines, shouting out, “Papa!!”

The man on the dock was tall, white-haired, powerfully built despite his age, and impossibly broad-shouldered. At the sight of Cosette, a wide grin split his face, revealing laugh lines and softening his intimidating appearance, and he called out, “ _Ma chère!_ ”

“Send the after spring line!” shouted the captain, and Courfeyrac chucked the heaving line to the dock. One by one, the docklines were sent over and made fast by the old man to the cleats and bollards, and soon enough the _Barricade_ was snug up to the dock. Enjolras jumped over the rail to confer with the old man, and Marius walked up to Grantaire. He asked, “Who is that?”

Grantaire chuckled. “That’s Jean Valjean, Cosette’s father. Er, adoptive father. He's the Harbormaster of this marina. He’s kind of a legend in the tall ships community, and he provides shore support for any tall ship crew that’s in town.”

“Why is he a legend?” Grantaire supposed sarcastically that Marius was toying with the idea of asking Jean Valjean for Cosette’s hand in marriage and wanted to know how scared he should be.

Grantaire leaned in conspiratorially. “Well, the first time he was arrested, he was using a schooner to smuggle food to hurricane refugees in the Caribbean. They got caught and he took the fall for his whole crew.”

“The first time he was arrested?” whispered Marius, horrified.

“He’s a legend, I told you. He’s not allowed in the US anymore, so he stays here in La Rochelle where they let him be the Harbormaster and like him too much to extradite him.”

After hugging the living daylights out of Cosette, Valjean stepped lightly aboard the _Barricade_ and made straight for Éponine. “I have a car full of produce from the Marché du Centre Ville for you.” He smiled down at Gavroche, who peered suspiciously up at him. “And a whole bunch of marzipan sweets for you, lad.” Gavroche’s eyes went wide as saucers, and it was plain that Valjean had instantly won him over.

 

———

 

The September midday sun beat down on them. Enjolras called a muster, and informed everyone that they would unload as much of the cargo as possible before sundown, and then be done, ready to continue the next day. He, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac supervised the rigging of block-and-tackle systems to lift pallets and crates up from the cargo hold and over to the dock; Marius checked shipping manifests, talked to the EU Customs agents, and worked with the trading partners to make sure that each truck was packed with the correct products—among other things, timber, packages of maple sugar, and tins of preserved fish. Lifting the cargo was heavy, hard work: seemingly endless repetition of sweating lines up and then easing them down. Jean Valjean laid in with them, and everyone was grateful for his help. At sunset, Enjolras and Marius the purser met with their shore-based trading partners and figured out logistics for the morning, and then all hands sat down to a feast of fresh seafood, fresh vegetable salads, bread, soft cheese, and pastry. 

After dinner, Enjolras called another muster. “Shipmates, we are one step closer to shaking off the shackles of Big Oil, one step closer to a sustainable future, one step closer to a cleaner ocean. We are the revolution, we are forging it with the sweat of our bodies and the faith in our hearts. Thank you for all your hard work, alacrity, and responsiveness on this passage.” He paused to draw breath. “In practical terms, welcome to La Rochelle. We’ll be here for a few days, enough time to unload all the cargo, reload and fill the hold up again, go provisioning, run errands, and maybe even have a little time off before we head back out. I suppose that you are all eager to enjoy what the shore has to offer after more than a month at sea; I suspect that Courfeyrac will be leading an expedition to the Corinth tonight. Please don’t get into any barfights, remember that we’re in a foreign country and _le project de l’ABC_ can’t afford bail money.” He gave Bahorel a remonstrative look.

 

———

 

Courfeyrac did, indeed, lead an expedition to the Corinth. The bosun was a consummate party-planner and the bright center of their social group, always eager to drag his shipmates out to paint the town red. Grantaire had discovered the Corinth and introduced it to the tall ships community several years ago; he was glad to see that although it had changed slightly since he had last visited, the changes sufficed only to make it more of a dive. For sailors newly arrived in port and in desperate need of an opportunity to decompress, a good dive bar was the best medicine. The ancient and venerable Corinth, none too far of a walk from their dock at the Port de Plaisance des Minimes on Rue de la Sauvagère, took up two floors, with a spiral staircase in the center of the space to connect them. The upper floor played host to billiard tables, table football, and a _pucket_ table that Bossuet had once brought all the way from Montreal. To avoid the crush of people downstairs, Grantaire made straight for the billiard tables and engaged Feuilly in a game. Joly and Bossuet faced off across the _pucket_ table, shooting wooden pucks at each other with the skill of long practice: Joly had plainly surpassed Bossuet in the years since Grantaire had seen them play, or perhaps Bossuet was unlucky as usual. Joly kept up a stream of curses in his Hong Kong British accent—“bloody buggering fuck”—and Grantaire remembered the stories he’d been told of the first time Joly ever went aloft, that he cursed a blue streak non-stop until he was safely back on deck. 

Grantaire drank much more slowly than he would have done two years ago—in fact, he drank hardly at all. He knew all too well that he was still on probation, that the _Barricade_ ’s officers would be watching to make sure he didn’t make a fool of himself in public and ruin this fledgling enterprise for them all. Eventually, though, he ventured downstairs into the clouds of smoke and the press of people to buy another Belgian beer, and spotted Cosette sipping a glass of _guignette rouge_ and conversing animatedly with Combeferre about environmental education at sea. (Marius had remained on the _Barricade_ to stand dock watch that night and keep Gavroche out of trouble.) Éponine chatted with a barmaid; Courfeyrac and Bahorel made the rounds of the space, introducing themselves to locals; Jehan was probably off waxing poetic with an old drunk; and Enjolras stood at the bar, probably ordering another round for himself and the crew as captains were wont to do, looking incandescent in the half-light. The barmaid leaned flirtatiously towards him; he responded politely but stood as stiffly as a statue. 

While she poured the drinks, a lithe, dark-haired young man in a leather jacket approached Enjolras and winked at him. “What brings you here, _mon petit prince_?”

Enjolras raised an eyebrow, staring dismissively back. “ _Je suis le capitaine de la goélette_ Barricade.” Wisely, the stranger backed off.

Enjolras was akin to a marble statue both in his grave beauty and in his austere indifference to sexuality. Grantaire had never known him to take a lover, even on tall ships where sex was more or less a byproduct of the stress and close quarters of the job. Enjolras’s old classmates at MMA remembered his coming out as gay, but that label seemed meaningless in the face of his utter lack of interest in men as much as women. Grantaire waited, unseen, until Enjolras had left with his bevy of glasses before he approached the bar and ordered his beer.

Later, Grantaire faced off against Courfeyrac at _pucket_ , and the bosun lost spectacularly after a long, hard-fought battle. Their friends cheered, and Cosette and Éponine took their places as the next combatants. As Grantaire backed away towards a corner of the room to watch, Enjolras materialized suddenly at his elbow. “Nicely done,” he said.

“Uh, thanks.” Grantaire was momentarily taken aback, until he noticed the half-empty glass of cognac in his captain’s hand and the way his eyes were ever so slightly unfocused. Enjolras rarely drank, so he was presumably something of a lightweight.

His gaze lingered on the blue figures twined around Grantaire’s arm above the elbow, or what could be see of them peeking out from below his sleeve, then slid up to the triangle of blue- and black-dappled skin exposed by his unbuttoned collar. Enjolras and Grantaire stood at nearly the same height, Enjolras just slightly shorter. He carefully touched the tip of an elegant long index finger to the exposed piece of Grantaire’s chest, staring at it like it vexed him. “Your tattoos. They’re not what I expected.” His eyes, heavy-lidded, met Grantaire’s, and he continued, “I thought you’d have nautical ones, a compass, a lighthouse, I don’t know, but you don’t. Tell me about them?”

Grantaire backed away from the intense proximity to his captain, silently panicking. “Enjolras, I think you’re drunk.” Enjolras frowned. “Do you need someone to help get you back to the boat? I’ll find Combeferre.” It was the strangest role reversal of his life. He cast his gaze around the bar, saw the Chief Mate picking out a cue stick as Courfeyrac waited impatiently by a billiard table, and caught his attention. Combeferre frowned in confusion and walked towards them. Grantaire explained, “I believe our fearless leader has imbibed a little too freely of the local cognac.”

“Don’t call me that,” Enjolras protested, and stepped closer to Grantaire again.

“I need to get some air. Can I leave him in your charge?” Grantaire’s heart throbbed madly in his chest and the blood was flowing quickly to his dick.

Combeferre slung an arm around his old school friend, smiling. “Yeah, man.” 

Grantaire beat a hasty exit.

He wandered down towards the sea, and walked east along the Promenade Léo Ferré, catching his breath in the September night air, feeling the cold fingers of sobriety inch their way up his spine. He wasn’t sure what to make of Enjolras’s sudden interest in his tattoos, or the newfound civility that he maintained with Grantaire, more often than not, these days. The feather-light touch to his chest—for Enjolras rarely touched anyone—was easier to explain, since it was surely due to the influence of alcohol. 

The sea, the mighty Atlantic Ocean, breathed in and out along the shore. The wind smelled of fish, and distance, and disaster, and Grantaire yearned to let the current pull him out to sea and away from impending heartbreak. He regretted his decision to come on this voyage: Enjolras was too close, too tantalizingly defiant of the conventional separation between captain and crew, too heedless of the effect it had on his ship’s engineer. But a plane ticket back across the Atlantic, especially at short notice, was exorbitant, and Grantaire was too fond of the rest of the _Barricade_ ’s crew to leave them without an engineer again so suddenly. He resolved to get through this port stay and the passage back to Portland before bidding farewell to the ship (and, if he was being honest with himself, going on a several-day-long bender). He would need to chop a lot of Éponine’s kindling to keep himself from going mad, he supposed, but she surely wouldn’t mind. 

Grantaire trod gingerly down to the waterline, and splashed saltwater on his face as a wave lunged greedily for his toes. Feeling much calmer, he turned around and began to walk back to the boat. When he reached the _Barricade_ , he nodded to Marius, climbed down the forward companionway, and slid immediately into his bunk in the fo’c’s’le. 

 

Éponine prepared an early breakfast the next day, a second feast replete with Jean Valjean’s gifts from the _marché_. Nearly the entire crew was aching from a hangover, including, apparently, Enjolras. 

The captain called everyone to muster: “Shipmates, another day of hard work begins, another day of building the future.” Grantaire opened his mouth to interrupt, then thought better of it. He contented himself by waggling his eyebrows, which Enjolras ignored. “We’ll finish unloading the cargo, however long as it takes us. Same drill as before. And Marius, nicely done yesterday—if the customs officers come back, I’m sending them straight to you.” 

Courfeyrac clapped Marius on the back. “Hey, purse. You’re doing great.” Marius flushed bright red.

They were all busy all day, working together to move heavy loads, so Grantaire never found himself alone with Enjolras. As usual, though, he was keenly aware of wherever his graceful captain was at any point in time. He hoped desperately that Enjolras had forgotten his drunken invasion of Grantaire’s personal space, or was too embarrassed to speak of it. That night, when the _Barricade_ ’s crew headed out on the town again, Enjolras stayed aboard as designated dock watch—much to Grantaire’s relief.

 

Jean Valjean brought them the keys to the marina showers on their second morning in La Rochelle, much to the delight of the entire rank-smelling crew; he volunteered to take Éponine provisioning at the _marchés_ and supermarkets, and to help pay for their food. Out of Valjean and Cosette’s hearing, Marius quietly voiced his concerns: “How smart is it really to accept so much generosity from a felon? Aren’t we trying to stay above-board?”

Éponine, if she were a cat, would have arched her back in fury. Grantaire was suddenly and intensely proud of her, as she blurted out, “Screw your bourgeois prejudices, Marius. Jean Valjean is a saint, a fucking saint. He may be a felon, but his record is all for doing what was right even if it wasn’t legal. He takes good care of the sailing community and we need his help—we people on the margins need people like him.”

Marius looked confused. 

Courfeyrac tried to explain: “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but most people who work on tall ships, or live on their boats, or work on sail cargo vessels”—and he gestured around at the group—“live pretty marginal existences, off the grid, because we move around a lot, or work seasonally, or whatever. We’re trying to be above-board, but that doesn’t mean we can afford to look a gift horse in the mouth.” 

Marius was not entirely assured. “Ah, yeah, but—“

Éponine interrupted him. “Look, if you’re feeling queasy about who pads our budget, go get Cosette to take you for a ride on her motorcycle—and then you can claim plausible deniability.” Grantaire and Courfeyrac laughed at the stunned expression on Marius’ face.

Enjolras turned to Grantaire, in what was probably a karmic comeback for laughing at the hapless purser, and said, “I’ll come with you on the hunt for that fuel filter in town. I’ll have to sign for the captain’s credit card anyway.” That was a blatant lie, or a polite fiction. They all knew perfectly well that Enjolras didn’t trust Grantaire with the captain’s card, didn’t trust him to conduct ship’s business on his own ashore without wandering into a bar and blowing the whole monthly budget on wine.

 

———

 

At marine supply store after marine supply store, they struck out. Their generator was an older British model, and no one seemed to carry a fuel filter that would fit. Eventually, Grantaire pulled Enjolras into an auto repair shop, and searched with renewed purpose through the shelves and shelves of filters. Enjolras wandered around aimlessly until Grantaire cried out, “Aha!”

“Did you find the right one?”

“No. But it’s close enough, and I’ll jury-rig it to work.”

Enjolras stared at him. “You’ll jury-rig a generator component?”

Grantaire raised an eyebrow and assured him, “Yeah, I mean, I’ve done it plenty before. Tall ships are always so strapped for cash, they gotta make do with what they can get.”

Enjolras was suddenly reminded that in addition to his reputation as a drunkard and a skeptic, Grantaire was known to be a highly creative and effective engineer.

Enjolras signed for the captain’s card, and they walked out together into the sunshine. Enjolras had little concern for aesthetics, but even he could appreciate the beauty of the endless tall stone buildings of the Vieux Port, nestling together like pigeons along the winding streets. “Do you mind if we grab lunch at the Marché Aux Halles? I prefer to eat local and buy straight from the producer.”

“Sounds fine. Actually,” Grantaire eyed him carefully, clearly struck by an idea. “We’re here and we’ve got time—do you mind if we go to the Musée des Beaux-Arts afterwards?”

Enjolras, against his better judgement, nodded. “We can do that.”

While they walked towards the Marché, Grantaire told Enjolras stories of La Rochelle’s connections to the New World, stories of its role as the embarkation port for ships leaving for _la Nouvelle France_ —Quebéc—with settlers and missionaries and cargo, and as a massive beneficiary of profits from the slave trade. While they perused the Marché and ate a quick lunch, Enjolras described his dreams for shipping more of Charente-Maritime’s regional specialties across the sea, and they discussed the logistics of cargo stowage. Enjolras was ever so slightly taken aback by how civil—even friendly—Grantaire was being with him. For his part, Grantaire seemed surprised by Enjolras’s amiability. Enjolras realized with a twinge of shame that he had rarely ever treated Grantaire with anything other than sternness, disapproval, or disdain.

At the art museum, Grantaire led him from artwork to artwork, holding forth on topics such as the classical stories depicted in Bouguereau’s works, Théodore Chassériau’s Orientalism, the incredible radicalness of early Impressionism, and landscape painter Paul Huet’s participation in the July Revolution. He pointed out details of symbolism and craftsmanship, innovations and nostalgias, line and color. Although he spoke in English and not French, other visitors to the museum had begun to listen in, as utterly charmed by the stream of imaginative and erudite narration as Enjolras found himself.

It felt, strangely, almost like a date. Having never partaken (or at least since his Maritime Academy days) in the sort of casual relationships that were endemic to tall ships, Enjolras had missed out on the associated benefit of having someone special to go on adventures with and learn new things from. Driven and ambitious, he felt that dates and even day-off excursions in port were unnecessary distractions from his work. He was pleased to find that in this case, when the work was going well, and his companion of the afternoon was an interesting one, he did not feel at all guilty for the lost time. He did, however feel guilty for something else: he had had absolutely no idea that Grantaire knew so much about history and art.

“Grantaire,” he asked as he bought a postcard of Paul Signac’s _Entrance to the Harbor of La Rochelle_ , “how did you come to learn all this?”

Grantaire’s eyebrows shot up. “You do know I studied art history at McGill, right?”

Enjolras paused in his counting out of euros, and glanced up in surprise. “No, I didn’t know.”

“I dropped out—I realized that art history wouldn’t pay the bills.”

Enjolras looked at him—really looked at him, for once. “Oh.”

They walked back through the old streets towards the Port de Plaisance des Minimes without speaking. At the Quai Duperré, down by the water of the Vieux Port, Grantaire broke the silence. “You asked me the other night—I don’t know if you remember, but you did—about my tattoos. They’re all Matisse, Henri Matisse, well, done in the style of his later work, his paper cut-outs. I love fauvism, his earlier stuff, with its wild color, but even more than that I adore how the cut-outs represent creativity birthed from adversity…and they look cool.”

Enjolras listened earnestly. He regretted that he had spent years disparaging and ignoring this thoughtful, creative individual: Grantaire contained multitudes. Enjolras hoped quietly that they might begin to construct some sort of friendship, that he had not burnt that bridge too badly in that past.

 

———

 

Grantaire spent that evening and the next day drifting in a sort of haze, unnerved by the absurd and novel pleasantness of his day with Enjolras. Fortunately, he did not need to think particularly clearly at first, as the crew was back into the physical work of loading cargo—mostly large oak casks of the local cognac—and strapping them in place in the _Barricade_ ’s hold. When the cargo was fully stowed, Joly stocked up on first aid supplies; Grantaire topped up their diesel tanks and made the generator usable again; Marius sorted out paperwork for all the new cargo; Éponine stuffed the galley storage spaces with provisions and stuffed the bilges with firewood. 

After delivering firewood that he had chopped, Jean Valjean gave the officers a warning that Grantaire overheard while stowing the wood with Éponine. “Be on your guard, my friends. I’ve heard rumors that Thénardier plans to report the _Barricade_ to the US Coast Guard as a stolen vessel. Keep your documents safe and don’t mention anything about extortion to the authorities. I’ve given Enjolras and Feuilly some ideas for routes into Portland that avoid any unnecessary Coast Guard attention. Keep a special eye out for Officer Javert—he’s a stickler for the law.”

Grantaire and Éponine exchanged grim looks. Although she never talked about it, her father was the scumbag operator who had run the _Barricade_ ’s educational non-profit into bankruptcy, and she had given Enjolras the blackmail material he needed to get Thénardier to sell them the schooner for far less than its value.

She scowled. “What a cunt my dear father is. I’ll talk to Gavroche, make sure he keeps his mouth shut if the coasties give us trouble.”

Grantaire climbed up out of the galley bilge and closed the hatch behind him. “We’ll be fine. If I remember correctly, Enjolras scares the living shit out of the coasties.”

“Just don’t tell Marius, ok? You remember that, the purser can’t know about the shady stuff.”

He nodded, knowing full well that she nursed entirely different motives for keeping Marius in the dark about her sordid family past. “Sure, definitely, purse stays above-board.” 

Éponine’s shoulders relaxed.

 

When everything was aboard and stowed for sea, the crew gathered midships for a last muster at the dock. Jean Valjean stood by on shore to cast off their docklines. Enjolras stood straight-backed on the quarterdeck with his hair streaming over his shoulders like a lion’s mane, the light of eternal visions blazing in his eyes, and his arms outstretched in gesture. “Shipmates, look out towards the horizon. Can you see the future? I see humans living in harmony with nature, practicing stewardship of the sea. I see a sustainable maritime industry that operates in accordance with the limitations of Earth's finite resources. I see a future beyond capitalist greed and ruination of our planet—yet I cannot see it alone. Shipmates, together our labor and our seamanship will build the structure of this new world, and our success will bring the brightness of a new day. This revolution demands our sacrifice, our hard work, and our vigilance, but I have so much faith in this crew's ability to make reality out of dreams. We affirm it here, on the _Barricade_. This vessel is constructed not of wood but of ideas. We of _le projet de l’ABC_ — _l’abaissé_ —we may be the underdogs, but we are great in our courage and intrepidness. Now begins another sail cargo voyage, another transatlantic crossing, and I am so ready. Shipmates, stand by docklines and halyards!" 

Grantaire smirked, and retorted, “Good pep talk, Captain. Should I fire up the engine?”

Enjolras turned and glared angrily at him, but then his face softened. “Yes, but keep it out of gear. We’re going to try to sail off the dock under fore-and-afts.” Gavroche whooped. 

Oh, Grantaire realized, he did say to "stand by halyards.” 

Combeferre called the setting of sails—“Haul your halyards! Cast off downhauls! Tend your sheets!”—while Enjolras ordered the casting off of docklines. Sailing off the dock was a tricky maneuver that required a deft captain, one who was sure of the peculiarities of both his vessel and the docking situation, usually someone with long experience. Grantaire was momentarily, involuntarily struck with admiration for the audacity and hubristic confidence of this man, this captain, this new breed of merchant mariner.

Once they had sailed out of the harbor and jibed around into the bay, Combeferre ordered the crew aloft to loose out square sails. Grantaire lingered with Jehan on the topgallant yard, gazing out into the bright sheen of the Bay of Biscay, where the morning light reflecting off of gentle swells seemed like something out of an Impressionist’s dream.

Jehan smiled wistfully, and recited: 

“‘Until I saw the sea  
I did not know  
that wind  
could wrinkle water so.  
I never knew   
that sun  
could splinter a whole sea of blue.’ That’s by Lilian Moore.”

Grantaire, grinning, responded with another Lilian Moore poem:

“‘I made a sand castle.   
In rolled the sea.   
            “All sand castles   
            belong to me—   
            to me,”  
said the sea.’”

Jehan applauded, and leaned forward over the yard to look at him. “I’m so glad you’re on this crew. I missed sailing with you while you were in exile—there was no one else to indulge my flights of fancy. It’s so great to have you back.” 

Grantaire felt a guilty twinge in his stomach.

Back on deck, they laid into hauling the topsail sheets home. There was a certain jubilation in the first setting of sails on a long passage, magnified in this instance by the charm of Enjolras’s inspiration. At the call of “Set the t’gallant,” everyone raced to the appropriate lines, and went at their tasks with a will. Marius, vertical-hauling on the topgallant halyard, “dropped the butt hammer” like a pro.

 

Over the next several days, the _Barricade_ ’s crew settled back into their underway rhythms. They sailed south to about 30ºN in order to catch the westerly currents: this would be a longer passage than the other direction, and even though they sailed through lower latitudes, it was autumn now, and the weather was slightly chillier. Daily deck washes—scrubbing the deck down with salt water—were less pleasant than they had been in the summer. Marius had neglected to bring enough warm clothing, and Courfeyrac lent him a coat, which he could be frequently seen wearing while one or another of his shipmates explained something about sailing to him. Cosette worked with him on his knot-tying and splicing skills; Grantaire taught him and Gavroche how to navigate by the stars; and Éponine regaled him with tales from her endless collection of salacious sailor stories. Feuilly instructed him how to keep a close eye on cloud formations, wind speed, and the barometer, because September was the peak month for tropical storm activity. (“Marius, that means hurricanes.”)

They often played cards belowdecks in their off-watch time, and Bossuet nearly always lost. Joly fretted over their health. Jehan tended the cabin-top herb garden, and Éponine threw his sprigs of fresh thyme and rosemary into her cooking. Grantaire and Enjolras, notwithstanding their unofficial truce, argued frequently and vociferously about politics and ideology while Grantaire stood at the helm, and at mealtimes when the captain ate with Charlie Watch. 

(“Enjolras, this sail cargo project of yours is literally just a drop in the ocean of transoceanic shipping. I don’t know how you can think that you’re making a difference.”

“All successful movements start out as drops in the ocean! Like modern environmentalism—no one had a clue who Rachel Carson was before 1962. And, as you well know, Tall Ships International only formed because a lawyer had a dream—it was just five ships in 1956.”)

During an argument over dinner, Marius expressed a political opinion for once. He made the naive mistake of speaking at length about his admiration for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, concluding with the statement that “His liberalism makes Canada great in the eyes of the world.” 

Enjolras’s nostrils flared, and his eyes flashed with displeasure. He retorted, “Justin Trudeau is a sell-out to the evil forces of capitalism and electoral corruption, and does not deserve your adoration.”

“But I would have thought—you’d support the Trudeaus—since your mother is Québécois,” Marius stammered.

Enjolras sat up tall. “Shipmate,” he said, “my mother is the sea. My mother is the Earth. And it is the Earth that Trudeau’s anti-environmentalist policies rape and pillage—and it is the people who suffer from his abandonment of electoral reform. His words may be appealing but his actions are ignominious. I cannot respect a man in government who does not act in accordance with his words, and Canada does not need a hypocrite like Trudeau to make her great in the eyes of the world.”

Poor Marius was shell-shocked, unable to move. Éponine, kneading dough in the galley, giggled quietly as the rest of Bravo and Charlie Watches hurriedly vacated the table and went to wash their dishes.

The _Barricade_ ’s crew bickered like siblings, but in the face of adversity, they supported each other like kin. Grantaire had always loved how the tall ships community became a giant, supportive surrogate family for people who had none—like Feuillly, Éponine, and Gavroche—and a source of gainful employment for creative and hard-working people who lived on the margins and might otherwise fall through society’s cracks. Grantaire counted himself among that latter group, and considered himself lucky that he had jumped aboard a tall ship once upon a time when the fleet visited Montréal.

 

———

 

First the wind picked up, and then the rain began. Enjolras sent the crew aloft to storm-stow the square sails and out on the head-rig to storm-stow the jibs. He fretted privately over the weather radar, steered north to try and avoid the worst of the developing storm, and even considered the merits of using the engine to get them out of its path more quickly. Combeferre reminded him that no one would think less of him as an activist if he resorted to using the engine to save his crew’s lives.

Bossuet, coming back to deck from the topgallant, grinned toothily at Enjolras as he drained his foulie boots before taking the helm. “‘He’s a good sailor, shaking the water out of his boots, not to be any drier but just a little lighter,’” he quoted, his cheerfulness only increasing as the danger grew.

They set a sturdy storm trysail in place of the foresail, and storm-stowed the gaff-rigged foresail and mainsail. The height of each wave that crested ahead of them rose and rose. The rain poured down. Water washed over the deck, soaking all of their feet. Feuilly and Courfeyrac rigged lifelines along the deck for crew to clip their safety harnesses into. Marius handled the rolling and pitching of the vessel surprisingly well, looking slightly green but powering through nonetheless. 

The sky darkened, and darkened further. Jehan’s eyes gleamed in the half-light. The _Barricade_ pitched up and down, up and down, up and down, her bowsprit disappearing under the crashing seas, her lee rail a stranger even under the lone sail they still had set. Courfeyrac dragged Enjolras belowdecks to get some dinner at the next watch change, and he was reminded of how grateful he was for Éponine’s frightening competence as a sea cook.

Grantaire popped his head belowdecks to check the water level in the bilges, first the cargo hold and then the fo’c’s’le and galley. “Enjolras, I just pumped out the engine room and cargo hold bilges. The other ones are fine for now but I’ll obviously keep an eye on them.” As he finished speaking, the ship gave a great lurch and a loud crash resounded from the cargo hold. Feuilly and Enjolras sprang up first and rushed over to the watertight door, wrenching it open—a brandy cask had broken free of its lashing-lines and smashed against the hull planks, its contents now draining out into the bilge.

 

The bilges of a vessel were the repository for everything that had ever gotten lost onboard and the leaks from every tank that ever overflowed. They were the resting-place of all failure and all effort. The history of a vessel was in her bilges, and now the _Barricade_ ’s cargo hold bilge would forever tell the story of this hurricane with its slight lingering aroma of cognac.

The winds and waves receded. The _Barricade_ had avoided the worst of the hurricane’s attack through foreknowledge of its path and careful steering; the head-rig stays would have to be tuned and repaired underway and they would need to find a new jibboom in Maine, and the trysail was shredded, but other than that the schooner and her crew were unharmed. The rain cleared up, and they all did their ineffectual best to dry off by standing near “Hera” the wood stove.

A nagging suspicion grew and festered in Enjolras’s mind over the next few days: there was something strange about the timing of events. Eventually, he decided to face his misgivings head-on, and cornered Grantaire in the engine room. The engineer was (mercifully) fully dressed—Enjolras had found himself to be shamefully less clear-headed than usual when Grantaire’s powerful muscles and colorful tattoos were in full view.

He started haltingly, “Grantaire,” and continued awkwardly, “I have an inkling that you intentionally caused damage to the cargo so that you could consume it, and I have come to ask you if I’m right.” He wasn’t exactly sure how to phrase this. It brought back uncomfortable memories of the last time he had accused Grantaire of irresponsibly endangering the communal property of a vessel, nearly two years ago.

Grantaire’s face contorted in confusion, then cleared in understanding. “Oh, you think that I cut loose the brandy cask so it would break and I could drink it? Because I was in the cargo hold at the wrong time?”

Enjolras nodded.

Eyes blazing with hurt and indignation, Grantaire shook his head in disbelief. “Why, why the hell would I do that? We’re in the middle of the Atlantic, and there are people’s lives depending on me being sober and fully functional.”

“Because you have a history of doing irresponsible things when it comes to alcohol,” Enjolras retorted.

“I know I fucked up. I fucked up badly. I failed a drug test, came to watch drunk multiple times, and ruined the inverter because I tried to engineer while under the influence and left a gray water valve open. But that was a long time ago, and I’ve gotten my life together and my priorities straight since then. Yet still, here you are, accusing me of stealing booze from the ship. Will I never earn your trust back?” His voice cracked wretchedly.

Enjolras sighed. “You don't believe in this mission, you don't believe in sail cargo, you don't believe in anything. How can I know that I can trust you?”

“Enjolras,” Grantaire responded angrily, “I believe in you. I wouldn’t be here for any other reason, you know that. And maybe one of these days you’ll start to have more faith in me.”

At that, Enjolras felt like the wind had been knocked out of him. He sank to his haunches against the engine room bulkhead, suddenly ashamed and bereft of his usual forceful eloquence.

When he had finally collected himself enough to look back up at the engineer, he was repentant. “Grantaire, I’m sorry. I was wrong to suspect you of misconduct. We’re so lucky to have you on this crew, and I promise to get better about leaving the past in the past.”

“I—wow, I don’t actually know what to say to that. Thank you? Please go away and leave me in peace to run the generator and try to process this conversation?”

“Understood.” Enjolras slipped quietly out of the engine room, and shut the watertight door behind him.

 

After that, things were more tentative between Enjolras and Grantaire. They were civil to each other, and cautiously friendly; they argued less often, or, rather, Grantaire baited the captain less frequently. Enjolras found himself constantly trying to locate Grantaire’s position on the _Barricade_ and trying to see what he was doing—not from any mistrust, but rather from a mixture of curiosity and growing physical awareness. Enjolras watched appreciatively from the quarterdeck whenever Grantaire went aloft, where he often worked in tandem with Cosette or taught Gavroche about the physics of rigging. As the captain of the vessel, Enjolras was generally aware of what all his crewmembers were doing at any point in time, in an abstract sort of way, but he left the personnel management and delegation of duties to the mates. This was something different, a prickling of his skin, a sixth sense that centered on one particular person, a keen interest in the rippling musculature and rolling gait of his engineer. He acknowledged his own desire, then set it aside like any inconvenient emotion to focus on more important matters like the Thénardier threat.

As they sailed ever closer to North America, he began increasingly to wonder whether Grantaire was planning to continue to be part of _le projet de l’ABC_ after they reached Portland. 

Eventually, he asked. Grantaire was sitting and sketching on the windward side of the foredeck one afternoon, wearing a nubby gray wool sweater and a white toque, when Enjolras approached him and sat down next to him against the bulwarks. In his usual direct manner, he cut straight to the point: “Are you planning to continue on with us after this passage? You’re more than welcome to. Actually, I would really prefer it if you did.”

Grantaire stared down at his sketchpad and the pen in his hand. “No. I’m not. I’ll stay for unloading, and help you find another engineer, but then I’m out.”

Enjolras’s first reaction was surprise, followed quickly by disappointment, and then dismay. “Why?”

“It’s—,” Grantaire hesitated, “It’s better for my mental health if I leave. I don’t want to tell you any more than that.” He avoided Enjolras’s eyes.

“I won’t pry. Please know, though, that I hope you’ll reconsider.”

Grantaire nodded. “I won’t. But thank you.”

Sensing that his presence was unwanted, Enjolras stood up to leave. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of the drawing in progress on Grantaire’s lap: it was a clever sketch of himself, in his usual red foulie jacket, standing at the wheel.

As the evening wore on, Enjolras started to question why it was that he felt such a potent combination of emotions regarding Grantaire’s refusal. What had the engineer meant by “it’s better for my mental health”? Why was he having such a visceral response to the impending loss of a crewmember? They planned to stay in Portland for plenty long enough for him to be able to find a replacement, so he had no real reason to be this upset. Enjolras rarely experienced visceral reactions to anything other than capitalist exploitation of the ocean’s resources, or profound injustice in the world, so this was new and frustrating.

Even worse, Grantaire began to avoid him—as much as one person could avoid another on a 136-foot schooner. Enjolras resolved to respect his privacy and refrain from pressing the issue, but it still gnawed at him. He supposed that he was taking the rejection personally, as a young captain still finding his footing in command, so he did what all good sea captains must sometimes do: he asked his Chief Mate’s advice.

Combeferre, leaning over the chart table with him, straightened back up and raised one eyebrow. “Well, I’m not surprised.”

“You’re not?” Enjolras asked.

“For one thing, you’ve been pretty hard on him, you always have. You’re better about it now, but you gotta give the man some slack every now and then.” Combeferre paused thoughtfully, looking down at his captain. “I’d bet you anything there’s more to it than that, but it’s not my place to tell you about his feelings.”

Enjolras pouted in vexation. “But you’re my chief mate! If anyone should tell me about personnel issues on my crew, it’s you! And you’re my best friend!”

Combeferre laughed, showing his straight white teeth. “Trust me, man, this is something that you gotta figure out yourself, or he's gotta tell you.”

More confused than ever, Enjolras dropped the subject.

 

———

 

Halfway through October, they swung their course around to the north. The _Barricade_ coasted along at seven nautical miles per hour, and pods of dolphins played joyfully under her bowsprit. At night, clouds of bioluminescent plankton swirled out around the vessel, and Combeferre spoke excitedly about the role of bioluminescence as a defense against predators, but Gavroche was more interested in how the plankton was edible to humans. The little monkey was evidently working on amassing a prodigious knowledge relating to survival at sea; Grantaire wasn’t sure whether to be worried or impressed.

In the peculiar way that news spreads instantaneously throughout a ship’s crew, everyone seemed to know almost immediately that Grantaire had refused Enjolras’s request for him to stay on. Cosette turned her large, limpid eyes on him, and sighed, “I know why it hurts you to stay, but I hope you know that we’re all going to miss you.” Joly and Bossuet grabbed his elbows and threatened to tie him to the mast once they hit Portland. Jehan wrote sonnets in his honor. Éponine frowned, then baked his favorite Québécois _tartes au sucre_. (Her approach to seacook work had always been that the way to a sailor’s heart was through his or her stomach, which Grantaire usually appreciated, but in this case he did not appreciate the pang of guilt that it provoked. A ship ran best, everyone knew, when the engineer and the cook got along famously, and he almost hesitated to abandon her to the mercies of another engineer.) Grantaire caught Enjolras glancing thoughtfully at him every now and then, but he assumed that at this point in the voyage the captain was preoccupied with other things.

As they came nearer and nearer to American waters, Bahorel bustled around inspecting all of the safety equipment aboard and making repairs where necessary, in anticipation of a Coast Guard “surprise inspection.” In the American Merchant Marines, the Third Mate was customarily the vessel’s safety officer, “responsible for upkeep of lifesaving and firefighting equipment.” Grantaire had not yet ceased to find it hilarious that Bahorel was the _Barricade_ ’s Safety Mate—Bahorel, who was a dangerous drinking companion on land due to the frequency with which he started barfights. At sea, though, he took his responsibilities seriously.

Lo and behold, as the _Barricade_ passed twelve miles out from Norfolk, Virginia, an orange-and-gray Coast Guard response boat hurtled towards them, lights flashing. At Enjolras’s command, they hove to, and readied the Jacob’s ladder. The Coast Guard speedboat came alongside, and an officer climbed up the Jacob’s ladder and came aboard the schooner. Tall, clad in a pristine navy blue uniform, with mutton-chop sideburns, a flat nose, and a steely gaze, he stood imposingly on the deck. The whole crew gathered around the officer, with the exception of Bossuet, who was stuck unluckily at the helm. 

“I am a representative of the law and the United States Coast Guard, and I have come to investigate a report that this is a stolen vessel,” the officer informed them in a stern tone of voice.

Enjolras stood in front of him, straight-backed with the conviction of his truth. “We purchased the _Barricade_ legally from her previous owner.” He had heeded Jean Valjean’s warning, and presented the officer with a sheaf of papers. “I have here the certificate of title.”

The officer eyed it suspiciously. “This is from Spain.”

“And we purchased it in Spain from a man named Thénardier. It is valid; you can check with the Spanish authorities.”

“It was Thénardier who reported it stolen.”

“He’s my father,” Éponine interjected, striding forward to stand next to the captain. Covered in soot and gleaming with sweat from the heat of the galley, she was an intimidating presence in her own way. “He sold us the boat for cheap, and he’s trying to commit insurance fraud by reporting it stolen. All of our documentation is perfectly legal—but he’s a scam artist. He’s the one you need to investigate.”

Cosette stepped forward, too, glowing with an inner fire fueled by old wounds. “He bankrupted the non-profit that the _Barricade_ belonged to, and then he couldn’t get her off his hands. He undermined her crew’s livelihoods and—”

The coastie interrupted her. “If Thénardier truly intends to commit insurance fraud, this case is more complicated than I foresaw. Do not imagine that you are free of suspicion. I will follow up with you, and keep an eye on your movements. Captain,” and he looked down at the documents in Enjolras’s hands, “Captain Enjolras, what is your next destination?”

Enjolras remained firm. “Portland, Maine. And your name, Officer?”

“I am Officer Javert.”

As he climbed back down into his boat, Éponine gathered Gavroche to her and held him close. Over the top of his head, she exchanged looks with Cosette. “If I do nothing else in this life, I will do my best to make reparations for how he fucked you all over.”

Cosette wrapped her arms around Éponine and Gavroche both.

 

Maine’s rocky shores and forested hills beckoned. Joly sang a rousing rendition of “Rolling Down to Old Maui”, changing the words to fit, and they all agreed that “Old Portland” just didn’t have quite the same ring to it. Bahorel and Gavroche fired a cannon at Cape Elizabeth Lighthouse, then fired again and again as they short-tacked blithely back and forth into Portland Harbor. As evening fell, Enjolras steered the _Barricade_ almost by sheer force of will right up to the corner of the slip, under sail, then ordered the crew to strike sail and throw a spring line over to the small young woman standing on the closest pier. When one dockline was secured to that pier on their starboard side, she ran around to the pier on their port side, understanding the tricky maneuver that was happening. Bahorel jumped boldly from the schooner to a ladder on the starboard pier and scurried up. With Bahorel and the young woman catching docklines on their respective sides, the _Barricade_ ’s crew hauled and eased the docklines each in turn, “warping” the vessel up into the narrow slip the old-fashioned way. The engine stayed out of gear, unused. Grantaire found himself more impressed and enthralled than ever by Enjolras’s skill, dexterity, and total determination to their emission-free cause. Flushed and heartsick with intolerable longing, he slipped belowdecks to dig up the correct shore power cable.

When he came back on deck, the young woman who had caught their docklines was standing on the section of wharf that cut across their bow, silhouetted against the sunset, peering down at the _Barricade_ as the tide dropped. Her long, lustrous Sicilian black hair, heavy-lashed dark eyes, and hipster-chic attire were well-known to Grantaire: she was Musichetta, who lived on the outskirts of Portland in a cottage with her truck, her chickens, and her raspberry plants. Mostly retired from the tall ships industry, she worked as a baker and a bartender, and showered affection on her two sailor loves whenever they were in town. 

“Ahoy, Enjolras,” she called, “It’s my night off so I’m stealing Joly and Bossuet. I’ll bring them back to you in the morning and I’ll bring a forklift too.”

 

———

 

Enjolras did not go out on the town with his crew that night, needing instead to get in touch with his local contacts and figure out a schedule for unloading cargo the next day. After hours of phone calls, emails, and staring at tide charts, he emerged from the Captain’s cabin into the hush of the harbor at night. Their berth at Portland Yacht Services was far enough from the downtown area that it was quiet and deserted after dark, which Enjolras appreciated. He inhaled deeply of the sea breeze, then climbed up onto the pier to stretch his legs. Although he was tired, and it was late, all the logistical variables and concerns buzzing around in his head precluded any thought of sleep.

He wandered down past the other piers, past fish warehouses, and in the direction of a rocky breakwater that looked out towards the sea. To his surprise, as he approached the breakwater, he saw that someone was already perched there, sitting in the halo of light cast by a streetlamp on the wharf. As he walked closer, he saw the stranger’s dark curls and realized that it was Grantaire.

Enjolras thought distantly that Grantaire probably wanted to be left alone, but he disregarded the thought. He clambered onto a rock a few feet from his engineer and sat down, nodding in response to Grantaire’s startled glance. “Thank you for hooking up the shore power and shore water so quickly.”

Grantaire raised an eyebrow. “That’s literally my job. Well, at least for another couple of days.” He looked uncomfortable. It dawned on Enjolras that he had effectively trapped him here.

“Grantaire, I wish you’d stay on, or at least give me a better idea of why you won’t.”

Grantaire hedged. "I have connections in Maine—I‘ll find you another engineer." 

Enjolras was exasperated. "I don't want another engineer, I want you." Seizing on an idea, he plowed on ahead, "Grantaire, if it's an issue with my leadership style, I deserve to know so that I can rectify it going forward." 

He laughed bitterly. “That’s—that’s not it. You're a great leader, despite your trust issues. It's me that's the problem. Enjolras," he continued, sounding like it was being wrenched out of him, "I've been hopelessly in love with you for years. That's why I kept trying to work with you and get your attention, and most of why I couldn't handle it sober. That's why I signed on again this time, and why I shouldn't have, and why I can't stay. I love you, and I believe in you, and I can't wait to see the change that you will bring to the world, but I can't be a part of it without wanting what I can’t have and hating myself for it." He stared out to sea as he spoke, avoiding Enjolras's gaze, gesturing wildly and evocatively with his hands. 

Enjolras remained silent for a minute, lost in thought. Despite the chill of the night breeze, he felt an absurd sensation of warmth diffusing throughout his body, from his chest to his fingertips to his ears. All at once, Grantaire’s strange mixture of brazenness and shyness in the last few months, from Portland to La Rochelle and back, made sense.

Something else was also suddenly clear. “Oh! That’s why Combeferre told me I had to talk to you.”

Grantaire finally turned back to him, looking despondent. “Oh, everyone knows. It’s humiliating.”

Enjolras cried out, “But it doesn’t have to be!” He held out his arms, smiling broadly. “Come here.”

He was not at all expecting Grantaire’s horrified reaction. “I'll find you another engineer, I swear, you don't have to—bribe me with affection, or whatever—”

It was Enjolras’s turn to be shocked and offended. “Bribe you with affection? Is that really something you think I’d do?" 

Grantaire's grimace was answer enough.

Enjolras had never wanted so desperately to clear the air, nor to clear away the hurt from someone’s face. ”Grantaire, I have some confessions of my own to make. You're right to think so badly of me. I never bothered to get to know you, and I was so dismissive of you, and that was wrong of me. But now that I’ve finally started to get to know you, I really, really like what I see. You're competent, you're charming, you're an excellent teacher, and an excellent shipmate; you're incredibly knowledgeable and well-read even though you only rarely let people see that; you're absurdly strong, and you're distractingly attractive.” He realized that it sounded like he was making an argument, and in a sense he was doing exactly that, finding words to express these new truths as he went along. “I'm not trying to bribe you with affection. I genuinely want to be with you, and have exuberant sex with you, and really, truly learn to love you.”

Grantaire was frozen in place, speechless with what seemed to be astonishment. Enjolras sighed, stood up, and climbed over the rocks to him. He knelt in front of Grantaire, reached up, and took his face in his hands. Carefully, fondly, Enjolras asked, “May I kiss you?”

Grantaire inhaled sharply, reached forward, slid his hands into Enjolras’s curls, and pulled him in for a kiss. Their mouths met awkwardly at first, and Enjolras was abruptly self-conscious about how long it had been since he had kissed anyone, but Grantaire was responsive and adaptable, all gentle movements and tender hands, and Enjolras lost his self-consciousness in the wave of sensuality and desire that crashed over him. He gave in to sensation, a luxury he rarely allowed himself. He felt Grantaire’s dry lips and the soft wetness of his mouth, ran his thumb over Grantaire's Adam’s apple and stroked the tendons of his throat. He learned the warm contours of Grantaire’s mouth with his tongue; he discovered the velvety curls at the nape of his neck, and the delicious inarticulate sound Grantaire made when he ran his fingers through those curls.

The vibration of that little moan from Grantaire triggered a new heat between Enjolras’s legs, and new ideas. He freed his mouth to ask earnestly, “Will you please stay on as engineer? I want to blow you in the engine room.”

“ _Jésus criss_ , Enjolras, how are you real? Do you even know how to give a blow-job? I could have sworn that you were celibate.”

Enjolras pressed kisses up the side of Grantaire’s neck, stopping at the square corner of his jawbone. “Oh, believe me, I know how. Castine is cold in the winter—we had to keep warm somehow. But I’m serious, please stay.” He kissed sweetly up the curve of Grantaire’s left ear, and bit the cartilage gently. “Please.”

Grantaire pulled away from him, just far enough to look him in the eyes. “Yes. Yes. Of course.”

Enjolras, delighted, lunged forward and attacked his mouth with single-minded intensity, nipping and sucking and clutching Grantaire’s muscular upper arms for balance. After a brief second of confused paralysis, Grantaire responded with equal enthusiasm. They tangled together on the rocks, kissing, oblivious to the hard surface below them, the cold wind coming off the sea, and the exposure of their position on the breakwater, until Enjolras shivered and reality set in.

Breathing hard, he rested his forehead in the crook of Grantaire’s neck for a moment. “This is all well and good, but I do have a bunk in a cabin that’s currently unoccupied.”

Grantaire laughed brightly, and smacked Enjolras’s butt. “Lead the way, O Captain my Captain.”

Enjolras scowled, admonishing him playfully, “Don’t you dare call me that.”

“Just you try and stop me!”

They stumbled together over the rocks of the breakwater, hand in hand.

 

———

 

Grantaire awoke early, nestled against a pliant Enjolras in the captain’s bunk. He fished his clothes out of the corner where he had shoved them several hours earlier, pulled them on, and slid stealthily out from behind the bunk curtain. As he made his way up out of the aft cabin, across the deck, down into the fo’c’s’le, and into his bunk, he was only slightly surprised to note that no one else was stirring. Leaving aside the whole impending discussion with Enjolras about whether he was willing to openly date a subordinate, or whether last night even actually happened, Grantaire didn’t quite think his disoriented state of mind would allow for coherent conversation.

He stayed quiet while all hands ate breakfast together up on deck, still feeling slightly shell-shocked, drifting in a cloud. True to her promise, Musichetta brought Joly and Bossuet back along with a forklift, as well as fresh eggs from her chickens and a plethora of hardy greens from her garden. The _Barricade_ ’s crew worked in tandem with their shore-side allies on the laborious unloading process: they wrapped strops around each Charentes cognac barrel, hauled it up to deck with a block and tackle system and then lowered it down (or hauled it up, as the day went on and the tide dropped) onto a cradle rigged up on the forklift on the dock, and then lifted it up with the forklift into the electric trucks that would carry the barrels to their final destinations around greater Portland. Reporters from the Portland Press Herald and Bangor Daily News stopped by, and then someone from the Boston Globe, each wanting to talk to the captain. With the interviews and supervising cargo operations, Enjolras was busy all day. Even so, Grantaire often felt a prickling sensation on the back of his neck, and glanced up to see the captain’s eyes cast over in his direction, a slight smile upon his face. Whenever that happened, Grantaire felt something indescribable and fluttery fill his chest, a sensation that he could only keep contained by throwing himself back into the hard physical work. 

It was an unseasonably warm day, and by afternoon, most of the crew had stripped to the waist. Cosette and Éponine wore sports bras. During the after-dinner clean-up, while their shipmates spelled each other at dish duty and took turns using the Portland Yacht Services showers, Enjolras summoned Grantaire to the engine room. He closed the watertight door behind them, shoved Grantaire up against the bulkhead, and went to work on his chest and arms, kissing and biting and licking along the outlines of Grantaire’s Matisse cut-outs. 

“You—are so goddamn—hot,” he stated breathily. “I can’t believe I’m letting myself do this.”

“I’m a terrible influence,” replied Grantaire as he undid the buttons of Enjolras’s Madras shirt.

 

By the time they emerged from the engine room, mussed and glowing, there was a note from Combeferre on the chart table, informing the captain that the whole crew was heading to the Café Musain for celebratory drinks, and that his presence was requested. Enjolras and Grantaire showered together ashore, threading their hands through each other’s wet curls, then dressed and walked up Commercial Street towards the old sailors’ haunt.

The Café Musain was one of many Portland establishments that had gentrified in recent years along with the city, but it remained true to its working-class roots in part thanks to Musichetta’s reign as bartender and the kind of crowd that her friends brought in. The Musain served experimental American food made with mostly local ingredients (to Enjolras’s delight), and brews and spirits from mostly Maine-based producers. Overall, the place had an atmosphere of delightful hedonism that appealed thoroughly to Grantaire.

Just outside of the Musain, Grantaire paused and turned to face his captain. “Enjolras, before we go in and see everyone, I need to know something.”

Enjolras’s expression was clear and fond. “Anything.”

Grantaire looked at the ground, and started nervously, “I need to know how open you’re willing to be about this—I know some captains don’t want to be seen publicly dating a crewmember—and I just want to be sure that I’m not overstepping boundaries, or undermining your authority—” He stopped abruptly as Enjolras pulled him into a hug in the cool night air.

“Grantaire,” he murmured into his ear, then grew louder and more strident, “Oh my god, Grantaire, you know perfectly well that I despise all those absurd old ideas about authority and rank on ships, and I know you do too. I treasure you and I want everyone to know it. You’re welcome in my bunk every night, and we can stay somewhere nice off the boat when we’re in port, and I want to spend as much free time as I possibly can going on adventures with you, and everyone knows everything about each other on a tall ship so what on earth would be the point of hiding it?”

Grantaire sagged in relief against him, and clutched him tighter. They stayed wrapped up in each other’s arms for a minute or two, breathing in tandem, then broke apart gently, exchanged looks of understanding, and entered together into the warmth of the Café Musain.

The _Barricade_ ’s crew was easy to spot: they clustered near the bar where Musichetta held court, a group of colorful, diverse young people. Even Gavroche was there, holding something that looked like a Shirley Temple with a little green paper umbrella, and it was he who first noticed their entrance. He nudged Éponine, and whispered in her ear; Grantaire distinctly heard her respond, “What do you mean, ‘they’re holding hands’?” before she turned around and saw them. In the rippling flash of awareness peculiar to well-trained sailing crews, the whole group reacted in concert, turning to look expectantly at Grantaire and Enjolras as they walked closer.

“ _Barricade_ crew, I have an announcement to make,” said Enjolras, his eyes shining with pride. “Grantaire’s staying on with us as engineer.” The crew erupted in cheering, pounding on the bar-top, nearly drowning out Enjolras’s next sentence: “Also, we’re dating.”

Courfeyrac raised his glass and called to Musichetta, “Another round in honor of the lovebirds!”

 

After one of Éponine’s trademark hangover breakfasts the next day, Enjolras called everyone to muster. “Shipmates, thank you again for your hard work. Another passage done, another hold full of cargo unloaded, another success under our belt. We have taken another step towards the reunion of humankind with the natural world, and you are marching in the vanguard. Now, you have two weeks off before we join up again and load cargo for the next trip. I’d recommend stocking up on warm weatherproof clothes, because it’s going to be cold in the North Atlantic. And shipmates, wherever you go, spread the word. Talk to fellow sailors, talk to farmers and producers, talk to shopkeepers, anyone you can think of and anyone you meet. We are strong and proud and capable, but we cannot do this alone. Tell people what we’re doing, get them interested in _le projet de l’ABC_ , get them engaged, plant the idea of sponsorship or commercial partnership with us. Rouse up the half-hearted in the name of sustainability and the romance of the sea. I’ll be here in Portland, doing the same, talking to shipping partners and working out logistics. If you have any questions or need help finding connections in the area, let me know.”

They scattered to the winds: Musichetta took possession of Joly and Bossuet; Cosette went to stay with Marius at the apartment he was still paying rent on; Bahorel hitched a ride with Combeferre to Boston and then flew home to California; Feuilly went to visit old shipmates in Gloucester; Courfeyrac and Jehan headed off in search of suitable timber for a new jibboom; Éponine and Gavroche stayed on the _Barricade_ as ship’s keepers, well armed with rifles and meat cleavers in case Thénardier turned up. Grantaire returned to Boothbay to sort out his life there and tie up some loose ends, then came back to Portland—where Enjolras had charmed a wealthy snowbird into letting them house-sit for their two weeks in port. His days in Portland filled up with work on the _Barricade_ ’s generators, plumbing, and electrical systems, and he spent his nights introducing Enjolras to the pleasures of a cultured coastal city and the pleasures of a pair of callused hands.

 

———

 

The slanted light of a November dawn filtered slowly into the _Barricade_ ’s aft cabin on their first morning underway. Enjolras awoke to a warm bunk and an even warmer engineer curled up against his side, and his heart gave a little lurch of happiness. He pressed a kiss to Grantaire's messy curls, rolled out of his bunk, and climbed up the companionway into the brilliant sunrise.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This story is in essence a love-letter both to Les Miserables in English translation and to the tall ships industry, particularly to the many skeptical tall ship engineers whom I have known and admired and upon whom this iteration of Grantaire is based.  
> Cargo under sail is actually A Thing, and this route is based on that of the [Avontuur](https://timbercoast.com/en/sail-schedule/). [Fairtransport or Tres Hombres](http://fairtransport.eu) is another important sail cargo organization.
> 
> The belowdecks layout of the Barricade as well as the logistics of sail cargo in Portland were inspired by [Maine Sail Freight](https://bangordailynews.com/2015/08/27/homestead/farm-to-ship-floating-maine-products-to-market-catches-wind/) on the [Adventure](https://www.facebook.com/pg/SailSchooner/photos/?tab=album&album_id=10154677699779585); the Barricade’s rig is based mostly on the square topsail schooner [Amistad](http://www.amistadcommitteeinc.org/sailing-on-the-amistad); and her sad backstory comes from that of the [Harvey Gamage](https://www.soundingsonline.com/features/fair-winds-or-foul-tough-times-for-some-tall-ships). If you have questions about any of the nautical stuff, please comment or send me an ask on [tumblr](http://batski.tumblr.com/ask). There’s a lot that I take for granted about life aboard tall ships after years in the industry, and I apologize for anything that might seem strange or jarring to a normal person. If the weird and wonderful world of tall ships appeals to you, let me know, because I have loads of recommendations on how to get involved.
> 
> I can't fit a full list of cultural references with links within the character limit in these endnotes, so you can find them over [here](http://batski.tumblr.com/post/168990465046/a-few-important-references-for-pour-reconstruire).


End file.
